If you’ve used an iPhone, you probably know it’s very easy to automatically back up your content using iCloud.
However, if you decide to switch to another service, things won’t necessarily be easy. Thankfully, Apple has made it much easier, at least for photos and videos , by providing a tool that lets you export iCloud photos and videos to Google Photos natively and in just a few steps .
There are a few prerequisites for this process, including having enough storage space on your Google Photos account and enabling two-factor authentication on your Apple account (which we also recommend for the Google account).
Once the transfer process begins, it takes three to seven days to complete, which Apple claims is to verify that the request was actually made by the account owner and to complete the data transfer. However, if you add or delete files during the process, Apple says it’s possible they won’t be copied to Google Photos, so it’s best to add them manually once that’s complete.
Although the images are kept in their albums, the videos are not and only the latest version of an iCloud file is copied to Google Photos. Smart albums, “live photos” and photo streaming content cannot be transferred to Google Photos.
Likewise, some metadata and RAW files may be lost when copying files. Finally, the duplicates only appear once, which helps to save space in the destination folder, but can be annoying if done on purpose.
Once transferred from iCloud to Google Photos, the file names of the albums and videos start with “Copy of”, so you’ll have to spend some time renaming them to get everything in order.
Please note that the service is currently available in Australia, Canada, the European Union , Iceland, Liechtenstein, New Zealand, Norway, Switzerland, the United Kingdom and the United States.
To transfer photos, just go to privacy.apple.com and select “Transfer a copy of your data”.
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